In this podcast episode, Jonathan Caballero interviews Dr. Angela de Bruin about a recent paper published in Memory and Cognition exploring how brief listening exposure to people switching languages can influence the speakers’ language control behavior.

Transcript

Melinh Lai: You’re listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast.

Jonathan Caballero:

Welcome to All Things Cognition. I’m Jonathan Caballero, and I will be your host today.

People who speak several languages, like many of our listeners, are often exposed to contexts where they need to use one or other of their languages, and even to situations where they might need to switch languages during a conversation.

Doing so may feel natural, but it’s actually an incredibly demanding cognitive task, and it’s influenced by many contextual and psychological variables.

One of them is being exposed to other speakers who switch languages during an interaction. This is the fascinating topic of today’s episode!

To better understand it, we’re having a conversation with Dr. Angela de Bruin. Thank you for joining us today.

Angela De Bruin:

Thanks for having me!

Jonathan Caballero:

To start, I’d like to invite you to introduce yourself and the title of your recent paper published in Memory & Cognition.

Angela De Bruin:

Perfect, thank you. So yeah, my name is Angela de Bruin, I’m a senior lecturer at the University of York in the UK, and most of my work in general is on bilingualism, and as you already introduced, how do bilinguals manage to produce words in one or multiple languages? But especially also, how do they switch between their languages? And so, the paper that was recently published in Memory and Cognition was a project where we looked specifically at language switching and how it’s influenced by the people you’re interacting with.

So, it was called “Language switching during production: The influence of preceding exposure to other bilinguals in different switching contexts”. And the thing I also really want to emphasize to start with was this was also really a student-led project. So we’ve got two experiments that I’ll say more about in a second, but I want to emphasize the first one, was Junlan’s, Junlan Wang’s undergraduate project, and then the second one was set up with the help of Romy [Daryanani] and other undergraduate students in our department, as well as Marion Coumel, one of the postdoc researchers working on the project at the time.

Jonathan Caballero:

Thank you so much. Could you let us know about the background of the research, and share why did you guys decide to conduct it?

Angela De Bruin:

Yeah, so for me, how bilinguals switch between their languages has just always been one of the most fascinating questions. And you already mentioned that it seems really easy, but at least in some contexts, it can actually be pretty demanding to do. Not in all contexts. One of the things we do also know about bilingual language switching is that in some situations it’s a lot more demanding than it is in other situations.

But the type that we wanted to look at is that type of switching when you do need to use a lot of your language control, as we call it. So that is, for example, the kind of mechanisms that we use to make sure, for me right now, that I’m speaking in English, and that I don’t accidentally use words in Dutch, so that I make sure that I’m using the target language that you understand, or that the people listening, hopefully, will understand. And that I’m not accidentally switching to Dutch when I can’t use it, so not accidentally using words from Dutch.

And so, this language control is what we really wanted to look at, and we specifically wanted to look at how that language control might adapt to the context we’re in. I think for everyone who speaks more than one language, we know that how we use our languages can change from a minute-to-minute basis sometimes.

You might be chatting to your parents at one point in one way, and then you might be joined by a friend, and you might use your languages in another way, you might go to a classroom setting, and suddenly you might have to use your languages in a completely different way. And so, one of the key hypotheses in our field is that our language control is really flexible, and that it constantly adapts to the kind of context we’re in.

And you can think about context in different ways. You can think about context, as the immediate kind of environment you’re in right now, and for example, what type of switching you might need to do. So, for example, if you’re switching really freely with another bilingual who speaks the same languages, or whether you need to switch in a more controlled manner, for example, going from one monolingual to another monolingual.

But you can also really think about the broader context that we’re in, and the immediately preceding context prior to the way you’re communicating and producing words right now. And that was precisely what we wanted to look at in this project.

So, we wanted to see, if you ask bilinguals to produce words in their languages right now, is that influenced by just really brief exposure to the language behavior of another bilingual in the immediately preceding context?

And we’re talking about just exposure of a couple of minutes, does that influence how your own production functions immediately afterwards?

Jonathan Caballero:

Thank you. I love how this looks extremely complex, and at the same time, extremely familiar for somebody that is used to switching languages. So, I’m really enjoying this conversation.

The paper reports two studies. Could you share with us what participants did in each of them?

Angela De Bruin:

Yeah, so our first experiment, as I already said, was a project led by a student, and so for that project, we worked with Mandarin-English bilinguals. For that specific project, we didn’t have a lot of information about their language background.

We had some proficiency and some language use measures, but for most of those participants, they were people who acquired Mandarin from birth, predominantly used Mandarin, kind of growing up, but were also very proficient in English, and for a lot of them, they were likely, at least regularly communicating in English as well.

But they weren’t necessarily… we didn’t look at their daily life language switching experience, but we didn’t necessarily expect them to be really frequent language or code switches themselves.

And so, in the second experiment, we partly wanted to ask some other further questions, we partly wanted to replicate the findings, but we also really wanted to work with another group of bilinguals who were more frequent, or we expected them to be more frequent code switchers themselves, and to also be more frequently exposed to other bilinguals.

And so, in the second experiment, we worked with French-English and English-French bilinguals, and here we really made sure that our participants had a very high proficiency in both languages. Very often, there wasn’t really a clear first or a second language. They might have acquired one language first, but then they might be more proficient in the other language, or they might use one language more than the other in the reversed order of how they acquired them.

And these people, on average, at the group level, also reported more frequent code switching themselves. So, these were quite often bilinguals who were living in more, kind of, multilingual environments, where they regularly interacted with other bilinguals who were also switchers.

Jonathan Caballero:

Thank you. Could you share with us what did you find when analyzing the effects of the different types of code-switching patterns in the experiments?

Angela De Bruin:

Yeah, so our participants within the task, we asked them to do quite a simple, and maybe a little bit boring, picture naming task, where we looked at a specific type of switching, so we looked at a type of switching that really places high demands on language control, what we know from previous studies.

And what we asked people to do is to name a picture in response to a cue that tells them, in Experiment 1, if they had to use Mandarin or English, and in Experiment 2, if they had to use French or English. And what we measured was how quick they were to switch languages in those settings.

So, we really just present one picture at a time, and we asked them to name each picture as quickly as possible, and sometimes this picture is a new language compared to the previous picture, and sometimes they can use the same language twice in a row. And we just look at how quick they are in those switch trials compared to the trials where they’re not switching, and then we measure what their switching cost is.

So it’s really just a measure of how quick they are to switch, and therefore also how effortful that switching is for them.

And we asked them to do that switching task multiple times. In experiment 1, they first had to listen to, either a bilingual who was switching really regularly, or a bilingual who was switching basically just once in the middle of a story to make sure that both languages were used and the kind of exposure they got.

So, these bilinguals they listened to… we just tell them a story, basically. So, for example, they would talk for about 2 or 3 minutes, about animals living in cities, or about the emotions that animals might experience. So it was really just, like, telling a story, like you would maybe tell a friend about a piece of news you’ve heard.

And so, our participants listened to one of those recordings, high or low switching. In both cases, each language was used half of the time, so it was really about the switching patterns of the other bilingual conversation partner. And then afterwards, they did this picture naming task.

And what we found in the first experiment was that that switching cost in their own production depended on what kind of bilingual they just listened to. So, if they had just listened to another bilingual who was switching really, really regularly, the participants themselves showed a smaller language switching cost than after they’d listened to another bilingual who wasn’t switching. And so, it was really about that difference in exposure to someone who was switching a lot versus someone who wasn’t switching at all.

Now, in the second experiment, as I said, we partly wanted to replicate it, but we also wanted to introduce a new component, a third condition, because there wasn’t enough switching yet.

So, in the first experiment, we worked with one type of frequent switching bilingual. So, that was someone who was sometimes switching between sentences, sometimes switching within sentences, just overall switching a lot.

But what we were wondering about is, is it just exposure to any type of switching that can influence your own language control, your own production? Or is it exposure to a specific type of switching that might trigger it?

And we thought, well, if it’s just any type of switching, it shouldn’t matter if that other bilingual is switching within sentences or switching between sentences. It should be just exposure to someone who switches a lot that should trigger that language control.

It’s not what we found. So, we found that there was still, in the second experiment as well, that there was an adaptation in that language control but only after exposure to one type of switching.

So, we saw that the participants’ switching costs were smaller after listening to another bilingual who was switching a lot within sentences, but it was not the case after they were listening to another bilingual who switched between sentences.

And we suspect that it might have something to do with how, kind of, switches stand out. Switches within sentences might be a bit more surprising, perhaps less of a predictable pattern, and maybe therefore just stood out to the participants more. But s, it does suggest that, yes, we partly replicated it, but also there seems to be more about exactly what type of exposure you’re getting.

Jonathan Caballero:

This definitely hits close to home, and I also really appreciate how natural it feels. For example, over here in Montreal, it’s a French-English bilingual city. And all the time, we can hear in a conversation, a café, everywhere, people who are, like, just randomly switching. It just feels natural.

So, I can imagine how participants in the experiment, especially if they’re used to those code switches, it just feels like everyday life, in a way, for a bilingual.

What I’m wondering now is, what do the results in general tell us about how being exposed to language switching affects bilinguals’ language control?

Angela De Bruin:

Yeah, so it, first of all, really shows that bilingual language control is really not just one static thing. It’s very dynamic. And we already knew before this study that it really depends on how you as a bilingual have to switch yourself. So, we know that in the type of tasks we use here, that we need high control.

But we also know the kind of settings you were just talking about in Montreal, that when you speak two languages and the person you’re talking with speaks the same languages, that that language control might be much, much lower, and that you might be switching for different reasons, like, because words come to mind faster in one of the languages, or you just want to express a feeling in a certain language that works better for your message.

So, we already knew that language control really depends on how you yourself are switching. But what we show here is that language control also really adapts to the behavior of other people around you. Even if it’s just really quick exposure, even if it’s just immediately before your context, and it has got nothing to do with your task. In this study, they weren’t even interacting with the other bilingual they were listening to. It was completely separate, just a couple of minutes, and still we see that very quick adaptation of language control.

And I think, for me, what this suggests is that, as multilinguals, we’re constantly monitoring the situations we’re in, and we’re looking almost for information about what kind of language behavior might be expected from us.

And with code switching, with language switching, it’s not something that multilinguals can always do, right? In some situations, you have to use English, or you have to use French, or in my case, I would have to use Dutch.

There’s also still a lot of stigma around code switching. If you think about educational settings, quite often children are told, you use this language, you shouldn’t be switching. It can still be seen as a sign of low proficiency.

So, for me, bilinguals probably are constantly looking for this information. Is this going to be a context in which I maybe can switch languages, or would be expected to switch languages? And if you get that information, like listening to another bilingual who is switching languages, that can then trigger the kind of expectations you have, but in turn, that can also trigger how you prepare for your language control to be necessary, to be helpful, in what you are going to do next. So it really kind of shows that flexibility of that language control system, but likely also the need for that flexibility, given that we’re constantly interacting in different types of settings.

Jonathan Caballero:

I really love how this research topic… Seems very, you know, kind of… it’s not only about cognition, it also has to do with society, has to do with cultural expectations, has to do with so many things, and at the same time, it’s just everyday life. I really appreciate that.

I’m now wondering… What are the theoretical and practical implications of these findings?

Angela De Bruin:

Yeah, so at a theoretical level, I really like, first of all, that you’re bringing up that kind of cultural value, that societal value of multilingualism, because it is indeed… I think language in general is something you can’t just look at from a cognitive perspective, because we use it, we use it to communicate, and so it’s got so many more elements to it.

So, from a theoretical perspective, it is very much looking at that nature of language control. There’s a really prominent hypothesis in the literature about that adaptation of language control. And so, I think it’s really important to understand, first of all, that it can adapt, but also exactly how and why does it adapt.

And I think what we’re showing here nicely is that it is not just that adaptation to any type of language switching. There are clear rules around when that adaptation might happen. And one of those rules might be that the context really needs to stand out in a certain way for you to really trigger a change in your expectations, and therefore to potentially top-down, also really regulate how you’re going to use your language control. So, it is very much about what is the nature of that adaptation.

I think, practically speaking, it does have some interesting methodological, kind of consequences for how we study things in what we like to think is a controlled lab environment, or what we like to think is just a participant at home, maybe doing an online study. And I think we don’t think enough about the language context that a participant was in before they do our study. Now, that’s relevant for bilingualism work, first of all, because our studies suggest that even just the 2 minutes before they click on your online study, or the 2 minutes before they meet the experiment leader within a university setting. That whatever they did or listened to in those minutes can really influence the kind of data, the kind of, in this case, control measures that we get from participants.

It also shows, really, that we need to think about, if you’re doing an in-person study, or if you’re doing an online study, how do we, as experiment leaders, interact with our participants? Are we switching? Which languages are we using? Are we just using one language, or are we using both languages?

And it’s something in our group that we have been working on quite a lot to make sure that that language input during the study is consistent, and that it relates to the task, so if participants are doing a switching task, then maybe the experiment leader should already be switching with them. But here we’re showing that whatever decision you make can really have an impact on what you’re measuring.

But it does go beyond bilingualism research, because you might now think, well, we’re only interested in bilingualism here. If I don’t work on language or bilingualism, who cares? But there’s also a lot of literature, for example, looking at the influence of bilingualism and language experience on executive functioning. Language control is one thing to look at, but we know that control, cognitive control, executive control, is a much, much broader area.

And if you think about the potential influence of bilingualism on executive control, that’s a really frequently studied topic that can potentially also tell us a lot about executive control and cognition more broadly.

But again, if these small, kind of, language experiences that are constantly changing are influencing what kind of… how we’re measuring control and what kind of control outputs we’re getting from our participants, then it’s perhaps also no surprise that we’re seeing really mixed patterns in the literature, where some studies show that bilingualism influences executive functioning in a positive way, some studies don’t find any influence.

It’s not surprising if we don’t always know what our participants are doing in terms of their language behaviors before coming to the lab, and if we know that, that can then also have an impact on what we’re measuring.

And so, yeah, from a practical perspective, I hope that it encourages people who work on control and or bilingualism to also think about who are the participants that we’re working with, what were they doing just before the study, and what is the language context we’re providing within our own studies.

Jonathan Caballero:

I can see how the experiments not only respond to open questions, but I can imagine they also open a lot of additional new questions. May I ask, what are your next steps in this research, and if you and your team are planning any follow-up studies on the topic?

Angela De Bruin:

Yeah, so within, kind of, adaptation of language control, the questions are almost endless. So, we’re looking here at one kind of component of it. There’s a few different follow-up studies that we’re running, or closely related studies at least. The first main line of work that is directly related is really looking more at the influence of the conversation partner on one’s own production and language control.

So, there’s a very large literature with monolinguals looking at alignment. So, syntactic alignments, lexical alignments, if you and I start saying sofa over and over again, I’ll be more likely to use sofa than couch, for example. And so, we know from monolinguals that that alignment exists. We know that there might be different mechanisms driving it, it could be more automatic, kind of maybe priming-related mechanisms. It could perhaps also relate, to more goal-audience-design-related mechanisms. For example, like wanting to create a connection with the person you’re talking with, or keeping in mind the language background of the person you’re interacting with. And it’s those kind of questions that I’m really interested in in relation to bilingualism.

So, bilinguals, yes, they can align their syntactic choices, they can align their word choices, but perhaps even more interestingly, what happens in terms of alignment of their language choice, what happens in terms of alignment of their language switching? And in the study we just talked about, we looked at another bilingual who wasn’t part of that interaction, it was just listening to someone for a little bit, and then seeing an influence. But what about if you’re actually interacting with that other person?

And so, in a couple of studies now, we’ve shown that the language choice of your conversation partner influences your own, but also, if your conversation partner is switching a lot, or just switched, that you’re more likely to then start switching yourself as well. But one of the big open questions there is why is that happening? Is that purely just a kind of… an automatic process, or does it also have something to do with, as a bilingual, you’re maybe constantly thinking about what’s the proficiency level of my conversation partner? They are switching a lot, maybe they appreciate switching, or they have a stigma around switching. Maybe I should alter my own behavior.

So, there’s a lot around to what extent do we think about what the other person’s background is, what the other person’s language preferences might be, and how that, in turn, might influence their language… participants’ or people’s language behavior, and potentially their language control as well. So, that’s one line of work, that is really closely related.

Another line of work that’s really looking at language control and language switching that we’re currently working on, is in relation to aging. So, whether these mechanisms as language control that might be really needed in some switching contexts, but perhaps less so in others, what influences that has on aging? So, we know that with aging, highly controlled conditions tend to become more difficult for older adults, and language control might be one of those examples, but potentially not in all switching contexts. So, we’re currently working with minority communities, across England, predominantly, to look at, with aging, how does language control and how does that adaptation to different switching contexts change with age, and also, hopefully, building in that interaction with the other bilinguals and those conversation partners.

Because I think, if we think about psycholinguistic research and bilingualism research, one of the things where we can really make a lot of progress, is about making more naturalistic study paradigms, where there truly is that interaction with other bilinguals. This study was a little bit of a step, perhaps, towards it, but still in a really artificial shape, but really trying to see bilingualism as this interactive, communicative, social interaction that goes on between people.

Jonathan Caballero:

I’m definitely looking forward to know more about these studies, and I’m sure our audience is too. So, perhaps we might have another conversation in the future.

Angela De Bruin:

Sounds good.

Jonathan Caballero:

Finally, I would like to ask, is there anything else that you would like to share with us that you haven’t had the chance to talk about yet?

Angela De Bruin:

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think… one of the things, as I said already, is really that trying to push for embedding language within the context, so within a sentence context, within an interaction.

But I think I also really want to take this study as an example of emphasizing how important work done by our students is, because I think this is a nice example of where we kind of played around with a new kind of study idea in the first experiment in a student project. We were then able to replicate, or partially replicate that in a second, bigger experiment.

And then those two studies together, I think, make a nice contribution to the literature, but it was really driven initially by a student project, and so I think, or at least I would like to take this opportunity as well to really value that work that we can do with our students, undergraduate students in this case, as well as the value of then replicating that work with the students as well.

Jonathan Caballero:

I really appreciate the implication of students, and I would really like to express congratulations for them, for you, and thank you so much for sharing all this with us today. Thank you so much.

Angela De Bruin:

Thank you for having us!

Melinh Lai:

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Featured Psychonomic Society article

de Bruin, A., Wang, J., Daryanani, R. et al. (2025). Language switching during production: The influence of preceding exposure to other bilinguals in different switching contexts. Memory & Cognition. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-025-01787-w